Bloomsday Perennials: Water mains and valves couldn’t stop Tom Leonard from finishing annual race

Perennial Tom Leonard almost missed out on a Bloomsday when a 200-pound water valve fell and smashed his foot a week before the race one year.

Leonard, who spent decades working for the City of Spokane’s Public Works Department, was in a walking cast and on crutches on race day and was fully prepared to hobble his way through under his own power. However, one of his coworkers volunteered to push him through the race course in a wheelchair.

“He brought some tequila with him to get us through the race,” he said.

That was not the only time his job nearly derailed his perennial status for completing every Bloomsday race since the first in 1977. Another year, there was a water main break the night before Bloomsday, and Leonard was on the crew tasked with fixing it. They finished at 7:30 a.m. on race day.

“I beat it on home and had to change quick and get down and look for a parking spot,” he said.

Leonard originally hails from New Jersey and was drafted during the Vietnam War and stationed at Fairchild Air Force Base. He stayed in the area after he left the Air Force and served in the Air National Guard for an additional 21 years.

He played football in high school and noticed that some of his fellow players competed in track in the off season to improve their speed, so he thought he would give it a try.

“I just fell in love with track and never looked back,” he said.

After high school, he signed up for road races whenever he could, so it was only natural that he would run Bloomsday. He liked that race founder Don Kardong brought in world -class runners.

“You got a chance to compete against them,” he said.

He recalls the first race being tough because of the unseasonably warm temperatures and the 1:30 p.m. start time. Some people he knew either passed out or were unable to finish, but Leonard did well.

“I won my age group that first year,” he said. “I was 19th overall.”

He would go on to finish Bloomsday in 41 minutes several times. In the early years, his goal was to remain with the front -runners for as long as he could. “It’s a challenging course,” he said. “Doomsday Hill is a good thing. You have to have something in there to make people sweat a little bit.”

Initially, Bloomsday was a chance to compete. But as the years passed, Leonard began to enjoy the experience and being a part of the grand community event it became.

“It just became one of those things,” he said. “It didn’t matter what you were doing, you were there that first Sunday in May.”

Leonard said he is amazed at how Bloomsday grew from the just under 1,200 runners who turned out that first year.

“At that time, for road races, if you had a couple hundred people, it was a big race,” he said. “Bloomsday just grew like crazy.”

Leonard typically would race alone. His wife is not a runner, and his two children walked it a couple times when they were young. His son did Bloomsday for 20 years as a walker.

Leonard still has all his race T-shirts, even the one from the first year. In the early years, he used to do his own tradition. He would wear shirts from the previous years every day in a countdown that culminated in him wearing the original 1977 finisher shirt the day before Bloomsday. But as his collection grew and that 1977 shirt started to get worn, he stopped.

He struggled with his Achilles tendons for several years when he was running a fast pace and had multiple surgeries.

“They are the bane of my existence,” he said.

Now that he is walking a lot more than he is running, however, his tendons are much less of an issue. He was 80 years old for the 49th running of Bloomsday in 2025, which he finished 24th among his fellow perennials with a time of one hour and 52 minutes.

“Your main goal is to finish the race,” he said. “Last year, my goal was to run nonstop for the first mile, and I did that.”

He is looking forward to the 50th Bloomsday in May and plans to be downtown along with the other Perennials. He wants to keep doing the annual road race for as long as he can.

“The hardest part is getting there,” he said of the effort it takes to get downtown and find parking. “Once the gun goes off, it’s the easy part.”